Lambsquarters (4 page)

A KNOCK AT THE DOOR.
A strange woman, smiling. “Will you have any kids on the bus this September?” Kids? Me? Us? I wonder now about that visit. I have no idea who she was or whether she really went from door to door to find filling for the great cheese-coloured bus that ran down our road each day. But no, no kids for the bus. Not this year. Likely not ever.

PAGE WIRE

BEFORE WE PLANTED GRASS,
we fenced in the mangel field. Or fenced out. It was difficult to know whether the clods of earth, menacing and dark, were a danger or a lure. Wire loops, rusting with age, creaking with dry, hobbled and loped against failing posts, waved in winds and leaned with snow. The raspberries twisted through their own wire mess, which blended into the barnyard’s tall untended herbage, camouflage for ground-loving beasts.

Barbed wire sagged at the top of the meadow, three useless strands for the itinerate cattle to tease. The fence worked for our first summer, but we hated the thought of its cruel pricks and spent hours that fall rolling it up into rusty balls, like huge medieval weapons, and carrying them off to the dump. The side field in front of the barn had no fence at all, was just lumped in together with the lane, the barnyard, anywhere the farm’s former
animals had wanted to roam. So Thomas learned to fence. As he got to know the back roads and lanes throughout the townships while on house calls, he watched the neighbours, took mental notes, made patterns in his head. He asked questions, gathered advice.

The mill keeper in Alderney sold us the materials and lent us the fence stretcher. We learned about rods, those units of measurement that had disappeared from our lives after elementary school, and from everywhere else in the world but the local mill, as far as we knew. One rod equals 5½ yards, or 5.03 metres, and the plural isn’t used around here, so we needed twenty rod of fence. Page wire, they call it, a mesh of rectangles, each about the size of a salt block, smaller sections at the bottom to keep lambs in, predators out.

I watched Thomas measure the distance. Some unconscious knowledge overtook his body as he walked with giant strides; intuitively he knew each to be a yard. Playing grown-up Mother May I. He also knew how to dig. I’d never seen him dig before. We’d never owned a spade. But the work came to him brilliantly. A natural digger. And I’ve hardly seen him without a shovel nearby since. He carries one in the back of the truck for roadside raids—discount trees and shrubs, ditch lilies.

We didn’t have a truck that first summer, so we used the car, a little black Vauxhall of pre-seatbelt vintage, to try to stretch the fence. The posts were all in. We had cut them all to length from the cedar in the bush and
gently placed them in three-foot holes. Three-foot holes. I can write that in a second, but the effort it took to dig even one of those holes would take pages.

The page wire was attached at the north end, a few staples held it along the way, and the fence stretcher waited at the roadside, joined by a chain to the back of the car. I might have done it the other way round, pulled from south to north unobserved, but gravity defied the magnet. We were soon discovered, and the flying Dutchman was there in a flash. Why didn’t we call him? Why did we think we could do this alone? He wheeled in the tractor (reverse his best gear), attached the fence and stretched it effortlessly. The mesh, trapped like Aphrodite by Hephaestus, was suddenly wanton and weak to its iron strength.

We pounded in staples, ten to a post, posts placed every eight feet. And the corners braced. An angled post, notched to the ends in one direction, reinforced in the other with twisted number nine wire, the farmer’s friend. And the corner post was a bully, a thick tough beast, engineered to last, to hold its own and others. The field lay fenced, from barn to road, shiny and sprightly and straight. Only the post-tops stood askew, and, in those days before the chainsaw, needed personal attention. They were hand-sawn on an angle to deflect the snow and sheer off the rain. The tips lined up in the sights in a near perfect trail down the paddock for birds to perch on until the sheep arrived to claim the space.

LAMBING

I WAS ROOTING AROUND,
busy at some task one morning late that first summer, when I sensed a sleek navy Volvo glide in the lane. We knew a few neighbours by then, had put out the word, had asked for sheep. Willis Harris, limping from arthritic knees that predated arthroscopy and replacement, unpacked himself from the passenger seat of the strange car, his red hair vying with his red face for brilliance, his lips split from too much sun, his hands gnarled like yellow birches growing on granite. He probably hadn’t ridden in anything but a truck or tractor for years, maybe for ever.

He wore green, the farmer’s uniform, dirty and mussed from the morning’s chores, but no doubt well clean hours before. He kept his hat on. We’d asked him about sheep, had seen his flock by the road, but no, he had said, they were just old yoes from the west, just to keep the grass down at the far farm, there’s
nothing we’d want from them. R.F. Harrow, he said, was our man.

And now here they were together in Mr. Harrow’s car, to look at the farm and suss me out as a potential shepherd. A gentle man, cultured, Mr. Harrow wore neat khaki pants, pleat-pressed, and a cap with a peak. His eyes made his denim shirt look blue. He shook my hand firmly, his own uncalloused. He wore Wallabees, not work boots. Not a speck of dirt on him or the car. I showed them my hen, Mrs. Chicken, and her chicks, cooped in the yard in a makeshift house. And I remember feeling foolish, playing at animals around these serious men who made farming their life.

But my sincerity must have shown, for Mr. Harrow sold us some sheep. The last of his Hampshire cross Suffolk flock, a black-faced breed on strong black legs, with wool springy and dense and short. We put the sheep in pens and found them a ram and learned everything we could about how to keep them.

I read widely, from the
TV Vet
, which I still hide behind the door frame of my grandmother’s glassed-in bookshelf (the book’s spine is a garish orange and turquoise), to academic veterinary texts, to farmer’s manuals and magazines. I apprenticed in neighbours’ barns for births and shearings; I sat in on agricultural courses at college and learned to manage my small flock well.

There were only five ewes that first year, all pre-named. Old Spot, Hampy, Blackie, Susie and Maggie.
Ramsey was the first ram, a thrifty Suffolk lamb, and though he was inexperienced, he performed like a professional and every dam “caught.”

I remember the first year’s lambing. It began during the biggest snowstorm of the season, on April 3rd, back when we measured in inches—we got a full twenty-one. The age-of-majority snowstorm. There wasn’t just snow, which can be moved, but wind, which moves for you. The snow was light—too light to walk on. I sank to my hips in the path from house to barn. And I walked that path day and night, watching and waiting for a first new breath. I had seen lambs born in other barns, had read of their birth, knew what to expect. But I had not been responsible.

Each time I inspected the barn, the wind took my tracks. I thought of farmers lost between barn and house, found when the storm was over. I thought of stringing a rope. But this is Ontario, not the prairies, and my journey was short. Nevertheless, I was alone for three days. Thomas, caught in town when the storm hit, was warm at the hospital, tending the sick. Three frightening days when no one could move, either in or out. I read of multiple births, retained placentas, prolapses, breaches, head-out-and-swollen presentations, head-back presentations, tail presentations, disasters. For three days I had no human contact as I awaited my first delivery. I was a nervous midwife.